Shop Pricing: The Most Boring Process in Neopia and What Neopets Can do to Help by Xandria Woolseyia

Today I saw that I had a lot of items in my shop… good, right? No. All of these items were set at 99,999 neopoints, and I wanted to make money, not just show off my items, seeing as they were the most random things in the world. So what do I decide to do? Go through the tedious process of pricing my items.

I get in a good rhythm; copy an item name and paste it into Microsoft Word. Copy the next item name, paste it. And so on and so forth until I have my first thirty items in Microsoft Word and can now look up their prices. Now I have to copy the names of all these same items again and paste them into the Shop Wizard search box. After refreshing many times, I find the actual lowest price and decide to put my item a few neopoints below that one. Looking at the clock, I realize all of this has taken me eight minutes, and what do I have to show but the price of one item?

I repeat this process again; recopy item name, paste in shop wiz, refresh a lot, put my price a few lower than the wiz. About 30 minutes later…I’m thinking, “Boy, I made good progress…” But did I? No, after 30 minutes I only had 12 items priced and decided “It just isn’t worth it right now.” Now what I want to figure out is why Neopets hasn’t made a program where we can just pay a certain amount of NP and it can search the wiz for us? All we have to do is put it in our shop and tell it “search for the lowest price and neomail me your results, and I’ll price my items accordingly.” I mean, we own a store. Can’t we hire employees to do this type of work for us?

With these employees, it would make it easier for the Neopians to make neopoints; it would be better because we wouldn’t have to spend 50-billion years pricing items, and we could get on with our lives, on and off Neopets.

Neopets has been a site for, I believe, nine years, and in these years it is hard to believe that they haven’t made shop employees. In “Plushie Tycoon” you even get to have employees but not when you can actually spend the neopoints you make. Shouldn’t the ideas from this store-type game transverse into your actual store? It wouldn’t hurt anyone to create the employees, would it?

With the store employees, it could give people more time to play with their pets, play games, create guilds, enter contests, etc. With the time I spent labeling 12 items, I could have easily beaten one of my own high scores, or even better, beaten someone else’s. The opportunities and chances are endless. If Neopets would just give us employees who could have certain hours to work and prices, fees, etcetera, etcetera. If you, like me feel that pricing items is about as fun as pouring lemon juice on a cut, then join in with me and suggest this idea! – Xandria Woolsey

2 responses to Shop Pricing: The Most Boring Process in Neopia and What Neopets Can do to Help by Xandria Woolseyia

presumably why they don’t do this, though, is so that inflation doesn’t go out of even more proportion than it already is – consider that if everyone was updating their shop prices all the time to be the lowest automatically, the value of items would shift incredibly fast. It’d also be extremely difficult to keep up with, because everyone would be changing their prices to be the lowest ~all the time~. It sounds good in theory (like, if only you had it and nobody else) but in practice it would be a nightmare.